NPR comprises stylization techniques for transforming natural images and/or videos into painterly styled or cartoon styled images and/or videos. In this specification, we will use the term image as referring to a still image as well as an image frame in a video sequence.
Primarily, stylization was applied for artistic purposes only. But, as styled images comprise less details and/or larger areas of uniform pixel stylization it is used for efficient visual telecommunication, also. A stylized image comprises a smaller high frequency portion than the corresponding natural image. Therefore, it is better compressible. A decoded stylized image comprises less annoying artefacts than the corresponding natural image compressed with the same compression rate.
A common technique for spatial diffusion is iterative Gaussian spatial bilateral filtering.
In visual telecommunication, it is important that stylization is achieved in real time.
Thus, there is a need for efficient stylization techniques.